Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Canadian_Daemon writes "A phase of matter created moments after the Big Bang is thought to have been detected at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. 'Striking' evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians, at the facility near Geneva, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced Friday."

Thanks, but it is actually an international effort with those of us in Canada working on ATLAS making up ~5% of the collaboration. For those with a more technical mind there is the actual paper [cdsweb.cern.ch] which was accepted by PRL this morning (after being submitted yesterday!). To give you an idea of what the events actually look like you can go here [twiki.cern.ch]. As you can see there are around 1,000 tracks in a typical event!

It's true that RHIC came before the LHC but the SPS and ISR came well before RHIC and none of these have really produced compelling evidence of a QGP. However don't worry - as an American taxpayer you also helped pay for the LHC, so thanks!

BOINC users who are considering joining this project should know that it only occasionally has work; the project is used for design and repair considerations related to the LHC. There are currently no plans to use the project to do computation on the data that will be collected by the LHC.

Now if they would issue 64-bit jobs for Linux hosts on LHC@Home, I would totally help!

Actually you would probably not want to help for long! Analyzing data from an experiment is I/O intensive as well as CPU intensive plus the executables are very large and require ~2GB/core to run so they are not really a suitable scale for an @home project unfortunately.

I was wondering why the submitter included the part "including Canadians". What was that supposed to mean? Why was it there? Like, it's in Europe but someone from America was there too! Moronic submitter.

Actually, its from the article source which is the CBC -- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It's just the local news agency pointing out that locals were involved in the experiment.

What a strange thing to say: "observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians"Does this mean the Canadians aren't team players or they weren't researchers (were they just tourists?)This Canadian wants to know!

What a strange thing to say: "observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians"Does this mean the Canadians aren't team players or they weren't researchers (were they just tourists?)This Canadian wants to know!

I think it has something to do with the initial line which says "Canadian_Daemon writes ":-)

Of course we're skeptics! Every year we hear about this crazy bastard flying around in a sleigh all night. Any sane Canuck knows that, during winter, you get your shit done during the two and a half hours of daylight in the afternoon. After that you stay the hell inside because its fucking cold! We just wanna meet the guy so we can tell him he's got everything ass backwards. He must be an American.;)

Because researchers from TRIUMF (Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics) were involved... of course... so were researchers from Fermilab, and other institutions... but the article was submitted by a Canadian.

Were they named after this cheesy but proficient Canadian band [wikipedia.org]? Now someone in Canada needs to build a collider called the Relativistic Electron Smashing Hammer, and we'd really be rocking!

Most likely is that the Canadian scientists involved are not allowed to talk about anything they are doing, ( gag order [nature.com]), especially this new stuff. But if one can get the information from other sources, the CBC can let the Canadians know that Canadians are involved in science still, although we're not allowed to talk about that either.

Yeah, that was really important. I would not have been able to even make sense of what was discovered in that Swiss/French collider without the information about the Canadian input. It wasn't just a quark-gluon plasma; it was a quark-gluon plasma that Canadians had something to do with! That's totally more revolutionary!

It's worse in TFA, actually. I don't know about other countries, but in the American and British stuff I read, you just don't see this kind of bullshit. Seriously, four separate mentions of Canada in that tiny article, plus a sidebar about what Canada has been working on.

I mean, really? Does Canada really have that small an ego? When was the last time an American publication had to remind us that they were talking to Americans who work on the LHC, that Americans helped build it, etc?

I'm a canuck and would be happy to celebrate a discovery by my compatriots, but it doesn't make much sense to say the team that made this ion-shattering discovery 'included canadians' when it included a lot of other nationalities too.

No I think it's reasonable to point it out explicitly. If they had just said "Observed by a team of researchers", you would fairly quickly assume that there wouldn't be any Canadians in that team, for obvious reasons.

Just like if a blind guy had ascended Mount Everest, the news article would read "A team of mountaineers, including a blind guy,...".

I'm a canuck and would be happy to celebrate a discovery by my compatriots, but it doesn't make much sense to say the team that made this ion-shattering discovery 'included canadians' when it included a lot of other nationalities too.

Well, as I understand it, the Canadians were mainly in the facility to get warm.

'Striking' evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, at the facility near Geneva, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced Friday, however some of them were Canadians."

I'm a canuck and would be happy to celebrate a discovery by my compatriots, but it doesn't make much sense to say the team that made this ion-shattering discovery 'included canadians' when it included a lot of other nationalities too.

Yes, but Canadians are the "special sauce" in any recipe. In my next project, I am going to insist that it "includes Canadians." Hell, Cajuns are displaced Canadians, and the whole world knows how good their cooking is: The secret ingredient? Canadians!

One of my cousins from Calgary sent me some seasoning, named "Bifteak de Montreal." It tastes fantastic, but I'm afraid to read what's in it . . .

The project is led by Fabiola Gianotti and involves roughly 2,000 scientists and engineers at 165 institutions in 35 countries.

As a young spud in one of my first big projects, the project manager kept dumping work one me. He told me two things: "In any big project, 5% of the people do 95% of the work." and "Work gravitates toward people who can do it."

I thought that he was trying to be funny, but now that I have 25+ years under my belt . . . I know better.

So how many of those "roughly 2,000 scientists and engineers at 165 institutions in 35 countries" are actually doing any work? Their conference calls must be a hoot and a half

all the Candian jokes are nice and all.. but this really was about trying to make people think CERN is the only thing going on in HEP or nuclear physics. Not so, and this is not a first as RHIC was there first. [bnl.gov] Glad to see CERN is catching up though.

all the Candian jokes are nice and all.. but this really was about trying to make people think CERN is the only thing going on in HEP or nuclear physics. Not so, and this is not a first as RHIC was there first. [bnl.gov] Glad to see CERN is catching up though.

I thought the big deal with the LHC is that it was supposed to give us the Higgs Boson, as no other collider on earth was powerful enough to create the Higgs. Enough about this QGP junk. Where's our Higgs Boson?

Who knew Quark had a last name, or that Ferengi had blood plasma? Even more impressive, the LHC created Quark-Gluon Plasma (presumably water with suspended hydrocarbons and traces of his DNA) with a mere collision of some high energy particles.

I have seen this quark-gluon plasma one other time. My, it has been a while. I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one. But there, at that point, we did it. At Black Mesa. We...unleashed...Gordon, you're alive! Thank God for that hazard suit. I'm afraid to move him and all our phones are out. Please get to the surface as soon as you can and let someone know we're stranded down here. You'll need me to access the retinal scanners. I'm sure the rest of the science team will gladly he$EOF

More than three thousand died in the Twin Tower collapse that occurred 2001-11-9, including Canadians.
Hundreds of thousands converged in South Africa for the World Cup opening ceremonies, including Canadians.
Overwhelming amounts of aid have poured in to Haiti from around the globe, including Canadians.
'Striking' evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians.

I don't see why this is modded flamebait-- Offtopic would be more appropriate, since the main subject line really is true. Either both sexes are treated interchangeably in all circumstances, or they are not being treated equal. "Separate but equal" is nonsense in this respect. If there is a draft, it should apply to everyone, not just males-- etc.

Granted, it could have been put forward in a more polite fashion, but the basic gist of it is true. (And any arguments about women being physically weaker than men

I've always found it weird that women are allowed and sometimes even encouraged to hit men, but the other way around would result in a quickly-won lawsuit of assault and battery. It's unfair, it's against the whole idea of feminism (wasn't it all about equality, at one point?), and it just makes me want to smack a bitch. (For certain values of bitch, I.E.: female superiority feminists)

Genetically, on average, men are stronger than women. Therefore a man hitting a woman will likely, and on average, have more serious consequences than a woman hitting a man.

Also, as SF-fed geeks, we tend to live in an idealistic world where men and women just have a chromosomic and trivial biological differences. The reality is different with income/education differences, and social roles that still are very far from implementing equality.

I personally approach it from the personal experience I have had with my sister-- She used to be a power lifter in highschool, and could squat 300lb. (no, she was NOT a fatchick.)

The major difference was that she was NOT raised to be a "Pretty in pink" type woman, but instead to be a practical one. We grew up in an agricultural community, and having some brawn was practical. You just cant throw hay-bails without it. I am her full brother, and she was ALWAYS stronger than me.

But somehow, it is "unforgivably" wrong when a man hits a woman, but not when a woman hits a man. That's the problem the OP is getting at, and I agree. If we are going to treat the sexes as equals, then they should both be equally strikeable for strikeable offenses. (EG, did they hit you? If so, you should be justified to hit back

Justified perhaps, yes. But would it be the right thing to do?

Besides, search the web and find the many references to abused women, and almost zero references to abused men. It's a taboo in Western civilization.

"Striking" evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians...

"People have been searching for evidence of this for decades," Canadian physicist Richard Teuscher said Friday...

The results of the experiment... were accepted Friday morning for publication in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, less than 24 hours after it was submitted, said Teuscher, a research scientist at the Canadian Institute for Particle Physics and a physics professor at the University of Toronto....

Peter Krieger, an associate professor of physics at the University of Toronto, said a detected called the forward calorimeter built in Canada...

Plus a nice little sidebar called "Canadian content," which says:

Canadians make up more than 150 of the researchers involved in ATLAS. They have mainly been involved with designing, building, and operating detectors called liquid argon calorimeters...

Basically, what I got from reading TFA is that man, Canada has a serious ego problem. And yes, it's a groundbreaking discovery, but damn that's distracting.

I don't watch the six o'clock news much. When I do watch any sort of news, I do see news of events happening outside the US -- and what I don't see is "Americans" or "US Citizens" every other sentence just to make sure I know we're important.

I mean, I can pick up US News and World Report, which is going to be news from all over from a decidedly American perspective, and it's still not likely to happen.

I don't even see this kind of stuff on Fox News, let alone legitimate news sources. In fact, about the only

As a Canadian I'd like to point out something you may not yet be privy to: The CBC is awful. Also, Canada has content broadcasting restrictions, requiring X% of broadcast content to be "Canadian", it's always been a kinda goofy requirement, and I wouldn't be shocked to find out that mentions of Canadian contributions to worldwide projects are included in their quota.:P Either way, ridiculous indeed.